Nevena Ristic is a  teenager from Kragujevac, Serbia. In fact, today is her birthday. Nevena celebrated her 15th birthday today at San Matteo Hospital in Pavia, Italy. Nevena has leukemia type AML M4. She first spent a year in Belgrade’s University Childrens’ Hospital and the leukemia went into remissiion after a long set of chemotherapy. The leukemia is back. No suitable donors were found in Serbia, so Nevena was recently transfered to Pavia where they have just found a suitable bone marrow donor from Chicago, U.S.A. and she is now awaiting the transplant.

Nevena and her family are fighting the long fight with this disease that takes it’s toll on so many adults and children each year. This battle of awesome proportions to regain her health, something that should be the God given right of every child, has caused quite a financial strain on her family’s finances. They have sent out an appeal for donations on a Facebook fanpage made for Nevena and Serbia Today joins them in that appeal now.

Nevena’s father, Miodrag Ristic, has opened a bank account for the purpose of donations with Banca Intesa in Serbia. We have contacted Nevena and her family for more information on payments from other countries and are awaiting their response. In the meantime, please do what you can to contact your bank, other payment or Banca Intesa directly to see how you can make a donation to the existing account from your location.

Help Nevena fight the good fight. Our thoughts and prayers are with her.

Banca Intesa in Serbia
908-16001-87

account number: 53-102-0002587/0

account owner: Miodrag Ristic

IT Showoff is a free technology conference on the subject of software development that will be held at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Technology of the University of Zagreb in Zagreb, Croatia on February 12th, 2010.

List of participating speakers:

Tomica Radosevic, co-owner and CEO of Trillenium, will be speaking about their on-line 3D shopping centre, a project by Hrvoje Papic in which over one million euros was invested.

Representatives of Croteam from Zagreb will be presenting their development of Croatia’s most popular game, Serious Sam.

Tadej Gregoric, a guest from Slovenia and representative of Motiviti will present on the subject of casual games for Nintendo Wii, iPhone and other platforms.

Tomislav Car from Infinium will be speaking about his experiences in developing mobile games for advertising purposes.

Kresimir Prcela from Pet minuta (Five Minutes), the company that developed the successful microblogging network Shoutem, will be speaking about implementing augmented reality technology in iPhone applications.

Prof. Zvonimir Vanjak, ScD, from Telegra, will be presenting, based on his ten year long experience in the academic community, a critical view of the Bolognia process, as well as IT education in Croatia in general.

Other subjects include the Microsoft Cloud Azure Cloud Computing platform, the implementation of Open Source sollutions to a large business environment, and the RazborIT system for managing projects financed by EU funds. Visitors will also have an opportunity to hear more about application development for the omnipresent and popular Facebook.

A total of 20 highly qualified presenters, a top discussion panel related to the development of web applications, good fun and socializing are what all guests of IT Showoff can expect. The full schedule can be viewed on the webpages for the conference.

For all further press inquiries, please contact Mr. Nikola Kapraljevic via the conference’s official webiste at www.ITshowoff.com.

We are all well aware that e-business, e-commerce, social media marketing and web entrepreneurship in Southeastern Europe are somewhat behind on those in other regions where the Web is more developed and its use more common. With new technological developments in the region, now is the opportunity to catch up with those regions. As most uses of the Web are still in development worldwide, many of us are in some way professionally invoved on the Web tend to follow those developments on internationally recognized websites, blogs, seminars and conferences. These are great sources of information and opportunities to learn about our specific niches and the Web in general. They do not, however, provide insight into the Southeastern European markets and the implementation of these new practices and ideas to our respective and joined markets.

We intend to make Serbia Today a place where web entrepreneurs from Southeastern Europe will gather to share their experiences and learn from each other. Of course, plans are well under way for the SEEWeb Conference 2010 where we expect to do just that live and with local and international speakers, but the Serbia Today team would like to get started on creating a community before then. As in – right now. From now on this site is reserved for news about past and upcoming relevant conferences in the region and translation of local blogs into the English language, so we can all reach a wider audience and break down the slight but significant language barriers between SouthEatstern European countries.

Our team speaks English, Spanish, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Dutch, German, Italian and French and we will be translating from all those languages. We once again ask you to join us in these efforts by either using the #SEEWeb hashtag when posting articles having to do with relevant Southeastern European subjects on Twitter, sending us links to such articles either through any of our contact channels, or by e-mailing summarized translations of articles from your native language to English with a link to the source article (you will be given credit for the contribution). Let’s all get to work and contribute to getting to know the SEEWeb region better!

We are happy to announce that the Serbia Today project has just recieved the full patronage of Napredna Srbija (Advanced Serbia), a NGO from Serbia. With their support and guidance, we will be organizing the first of many major events to come. The event has been dubbed SEEWeb 2010 and is planned for the first week of June 2010. More information will be released within the coming days and weeks as to the exact nature and purpose of the SEEweb event.

Beside Napredna Srbija as patrons, the founding collaborators on Serbia Today and  SEEWeb are Sasa Jovanovic and Aleksandar Jovanovic, better known as Hermes Creative, Tomislav Car and his Web poduzetnik, Ivan Dimitrijevic, a.k.a. Fotomanijak, and Sergei Oudman and Danica Radisic from H2O Solutions as the initiators of Serbia Today.

Our goal is to create a strong and efficient community for web entrepreneurs and online marketers in Southeastern Europe, a place where we can collaborate, learn from each other and use our common knowledge to influence and assist web entrepreneurs and further development of the Web in the region.

Drago nam je da možemo da objavimo da je Serbia Today projekat upravo dobio pokroviteljstvo Udruženja građana (NVO) Napredna Srbija. Sa njihovom podrškom i savetima, pripremamo se za prvi od mnogobrojnih događaja koje planiramo. Ovaj prvi događaj smo nazvali SEEWeb 2010 i planira se za prvu sedmicu juna meseca ove godine. Objavićemo više informacija u toku narednih dana i sedmica, vezano za tačnu prirodu i svrhu SEEWeb događaja.

Pored Napredne Srbije kao pokrovitelja, glavni saradnici na Serbia Today i  SEEWeb-u su Saša Jovanović i Aleksandar Jovanović, poznatiji kao Hermes Creative, Tomislav Car i njegov Web poduzetnik, Ivan Dimitrijević, poznatiji kao Fotomanijak, i Sergei Oudman i Danica Radišić iz H2O Solutions kao začetnici Serbia Today-a.

Naš cilj je da stvorimo jaku i efikasnu zajednicu web preduzetnika i onih koji se bave online marketingom u jugoistočnoj Evropi, mesto gde ćemo moći da sarađujemo, učimo jedni od drugih i koristimo naše zajedničko znanje i resurse da utičemo i pomognemo web preduzetnicima i daljem razvoju Web-a u regionu.

If you’re a web entrepreneur or online marketer then you most likely have a personal of company blog. What you see on the right sidebar ofall the pages on Serbia-Today.com is the Twitter Hashtag Widget for WordPress, a handy little tool that we are going to use to get to know the SEE web a little better.

We’ll be using this widget to follow all tweets containing the #SEEweb hashtag. If your blog has anything to do with Southeastern Europe, we ask you to join us by including this particular hashtag whenever you tweet a post or news on your blog or website. Feel free to use the hashtag in any tweets that have anything to do with the region or to promote your blog if you’re from the region, on any subject and in any language. And don’t forget to check back here regularly to see what’s new on the Twitter #SEEweb scene!

The reason Serbia-Today.com is running at this early phase of our project is because we wanted to share this process with all of you. The process of bringing an entire region of web entrepreneurs and online marketers together in real time and with concrete results. This means that we will only be able to unveil this project one layer at a time.

At this point we are ready to announce that we are completing the preliminary phase of what might turn out to be one of the more serious undertakings that will benefit web entrepreneurs throughout the Southeast European region.

Our founding team is comprised of seven members, all web entrepreneurs and professional marketers from Serbia and Croatia, and we will be able to announce more about our plans and events for the current year within the next two weeks. In the meantime, we will be unfolding some activities related to those plans as soon as later today. All these efforts will still have one common goal – to connect web entrepreneurs in the SEE region and encourage cooperation and new ideas. We hope you will join us in these efforts as we continue to reveal more.